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Boys like blue, girls like pink and there isn't much anybody can do about it, researchers say.

Their study, published in the journal Current Biology, is one of the first to show scientifically that there are gender-based colour preferences.

Researchers say these differences may have a basis in evolution in which females developed a preference for reddish colours associated with riper fruit and healthier faces.

Recent studies have suggested there is a universal preference for blue.

But there has not been much previous evidence to support the idea of sex differences when picking colours, says lead author Professor Anya Hurlbert, a neuroscientist at the UK's University of Newcastle upon Tyne.

"We speculate that this sex difference arose from sex-specific functional specialisation in the evolutionary division of labour," the researchers write. "There are biological reasons for liking reddish things."

Hurlbert also acknowledges that culture may also play a role in colour preferences.

"Culture may exploit and compound this natural female preferences," she says.

In the study, the researchers asked a group of men and women to look at about 1000 pairs of coloured rectangles on a computer screen in a dark room and pick the ones they liked best, as quickly as possible.

Afterwards, Hurlbert and colleague Dr Yazhu Ling plotted the results along the colour spectrum and found that while men prefer blue, women gravitate towards the pinker end of the blue spectrum.

"Women have a very clear pattern. It's low in the yellow and green regions and rises to a peak in the purplish to reddish region," she says.

Hurlbert believes women's preference for pink may have evolved on top of a natural, universal preference for blue.

"When you add it together you get the colours they intrinsically like, you get bluish red, which is sort of lilac or pink," she says.

For men, thinking about colours was less important because as hunters they just needed to spot something dark and shoot it, Hurlbert says.

But how about the universal appeal of blue? Could evolution explain that too?

"Going back to our savanna days, we would have a natural preference for a clear blue sky, because it signalled good weather," says Hurlbert. "Clear blue also signals a good water source."